Author: Gautam Sen
Publication: Newsinsight.net
Date:
URL: http://newsinsight.net/columns/full_column11a.htm
A huge number of people have a stake in ensuring
an overbearing role for the government in running the Indian economy. The
government is the central platform for the destructive re-distributive struggle
that has seized India, overshadowing the primary goal of productive effort.
Everyone seeks a piece of the ill-gotten revenue pie and has an imaginative
argument to buttress their claim. And ministerial office itself seems to mean
that nothing has to ever be paid for again and every urgent necessity entails
a trip abroad, preferably with one's entire family in tow. One calculation
suggests that half of India's entire middle class is directly or indirectly
dependent on the government for their incomes. Gratifyingly for them, government
jobs, whether in administration, medicine, teaching and much else besides,
are political rewards and very little actual work is required of the privileged
few lucky enough to have them. In some leading teaching institutions in the
national capital staff appear once a month only to collect their salaries.
Unsurprisingly, in such a corrupt system,
much public investment is simply a circuitous route for embezzlement, since
contractors, politicians and bureaucrats conspire to siphon off as much as
possible. The ostensible intended work itself is the least of their concerns.
The immediate damage is through direct theft, but private producers also suffer
huge productivity losses because they need efficient services like transportation,
energy, etc, in order to operate themselves. This is why the failure to expand
employment in the organised sector is the unavoidable corollary of the mafia
trade union politics of India, supported by all major political parties, which
nurture their respective labour wings. This minuscule group of blackmailers
and extortionists has made it extremely unattractive for prospective employers
to hire labour because being held to ransom by trade unions is the norm. Only
informal employment has grown in India in the past decade while employment
in the formal sector has actually shrunk. But the Left is always present to
ensure that the jobs of their work-shy members are protected at all costs.
The incumbent prime minister's powerlessness
in the face of rampant deceit and unashamed criminality within his own Union
cabinet, with a succession of indicted ministerial colleagues forcibly ejected,
is a harbinger of the shape of things to come. The writing is clearly on the
wall since the functioning of most state governments has merely become a sublimated
cover for illegality. In the grimly self-destructive pursuit of money and
power political life in India has been reduced to unadulterated entrepreneurial
activity that stops at nothing. Such is the cynical depth of this phenomenon
that one sighs in silent relief when an accused legislator or parliamentarian
is only alleged to be involved in kidnapping and armed robbery rather than
multiple homicide.
In some regions the pretence of serving the
public interest has been replaced by out-and-out criminality. A shocking calculation
suggests that legislators accused of criminal activities in UP, belonging
to all political parties, could form a government of their own, since they
have enjoyed an absolute majority in the state assembly for some time. Not
only are state legislatures and the national parliament itself teeming with
felons, chief ministers of many states are also engaged in blatant criminal
activity. Recently, a chief minister vitiated all precepts of justice and
morality by instigating the illegal arrest of religious leaders, who define
the very nature of Indian civilisation. An ally of the same state government
is also ruthlessly harassing a business rival for making innocuous statements
on safe sex by wilfully misusing a fully complicit judiciary.
The persistence of any public purpose in governance
is not so much fortuitous as merely the final vestiges of a dwindling historic
idealism. It survives by virtue of a degree of inertia, the prior dominance
of the better educated and the integrity of selection procedures for higher
administrative jobs, preventing outright collapse. But the arrangements barely
survive. The bureaucrat, who may have once idealistically sought to further
the public interest, has increasingly joined hands with his political masters
to pursue corrupt enrichment. The capital city itself is in the thrall of
political goons in hock to criminals, collectively engaged in a feeding frenzy
of theft and extortion. The recent attempt to impugn an uncharacteristically
honest municipal chief executive, who forlornly sought to inject a modicum
of transparency, was launched jointly by government and Opposition legislative
members. Amazingly, it went virtually unnoticed and he is now being put out
to pasture.
The political class as a whole, both government
and Opposition, hoodwinks the electorate by engaging in make-believe public
jousts. In fact, they co-operate with each other behind the scenes against
the public interest. Occasionally, an unfortunate individual may succumb in
the course of such contrived displays of public divergences, but the political
class usually ensures its own collective survival by looking after each other.
Thus, governments in power rarely go in for the kill against the Opposition,
confident that they too will receive due consideration from them when they
happen to form the government. A catalogue of the mutual courtesies between
political parties in recent history, while they strive to fabricate the impression
of earnest and high-minded conflicts, is a salutary reminder that political
entrepreneurs are not about to commit suicide by fighting each other to death.
They have too much to gain by co-operating discreetly in order to secure their
extremely profitable joint future robbing a credulous public.
It is also clear that ISI terrorists like
Dawood Ibrahim and his associates were financing major political parties within
India and businesses in various parts of the country. This gives the lie to
expressions of serious intention by the Indian government in demanding Dawood's
extradition from Pakistan. In fact, one senior Maharashtra politician was
seen in the company of Dawood in the VIP lounge of Mumbai's international
airport at a time when he was supposedly a fugitive from the law, accused
of mass murder. But what are a few hundred dead bodies and national honour
to Indian politicians and their bureaucratic co-conspirators when both can
be bartered for hard cash? The lethal pincer has bitten deep indeed into the
entrails of India.
Concluded
Dr Gautam Sen formerly taught at the London
School of Economics & Political Science.
